Big Easy rider: Dennis Hopper's legacy inextricably intertwined with New Orleans

Big Easy rider: Dennis Hopper's legacy inextricably intertwined with New Orleans
June 1, 2010
By Mike Scott
The Times-Picayune

Dennis Hopper wasn't from New Orleans. But he should have been.
The Oscar-nominated actor, who died Saturday of complications from prostate cancer, was for much of his early career a walking, talking portrait of a Bourbon Street hellraiser: wild, a little unhinged, maybe even dangerous, but charismatic to the hilt and (on film, at least) a whole lot of fun if you caught him at the right moment.
It's fitting, then, that the movie for which he'll most be remembered -- the movie that defined his career and that helped redefine the way Hollywood approached its craft -- is "Easy Rider," the 1969 counterculture touchstone that used New Orleans as its symbolic Shangri-La.
Hopper directed, co-wrote and starred in "Easy Rider," playing the fringe-wearing, headband-sporting Billy, who accompanies Peter Fonda's "Captain America" on a motorcycle trip -- and multiple drug-induced trips -- from Los Angeles to New Orleans, two easy riders on a quest for a Big Easy state of mind. The often-improvised script -- which Hopper wrote with Fonda and Terry Southern -- would earn him an Oscar nomination.
He would go on to appear in such notable films as "Apocalypse Now," "Rumblefish" and "Blue Velvet," and he would again be nominated for an Oscar in 1986 for his supporting role in the sports drama "Hoosiers." (Scan highlights from Dennis Hopper's film career here.) But Hopper would never match the depth -- or achieve the same resonance with audiences -- that he did in "Easy Rider."
Associated Press
Dennis Hopper, shown in a 2008 photo, died May 24 at 74 years old.
"We saw it as a Western, only on motorcycles," he told Time magazine in 1986. "We were the strangers in town, the outlaws."
He also saw it, he said in another interview years later, as a time capsule of the 1960s, a brutally honest snapshot of the time -- something he said no other filmmakers were providing.
In the film, the goal of Captain America and Billy is to make it to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras. What the two disillusioned long-hairs are really looking for, however, is freedom -- from the establishment, from intolerance, from the pressures of their modern world. Along the way, maybe they'll also find their hippified holy grail: confirmation that the optimism from earlier in the decade was at least a little bit warranted.
If that exists anywhere, they figure, it's got to be in New Orleans. On Bourbon Street. At Carnival time. They don't want to so much visit New Orleans as they want to achieve New Orleans.
"I'm gonna go to Mardi Gras," Hopper's loquatious, easy-smiling Billy sings in no particular key early in the trip, "and get me a Mardi Gras queeeeen!"
On the way, the boys get tossed in jail for interfering with a street parade, in a scene shot in the St. Mary Parish town of Franklin, between Morgan City and New Iberia, and populated by locals instead of real actors. The upside: There they get a New Orleans street address at which to start their search for paradise.
It's provided by a rye-loving lawyer named George -- played with tremendous verve by a then-little-known actor named Jack Nicholson -- who asks to be taken along on their quest.
"The governor of Louisiana gave me this," George says, holding up a business card and reading from it. " 'Madame Tinkertoy's House of Blue Lights, corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, New Orleans, Louisiana.' Now, this is supposed to be the finest whorehouse in the South. These ain't no pork chops -- these are U.S. prime!"

When Dennis Hopper shot film of Peter Fonda conversing with the statue atop the Italian Benevolent Society Tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, he did so without permission or permits.
They make it there, too, but by then things are more mournful than they had planned -- and they are more disillusioned than before. Between picking up George and arriving in New Orleans, they have a tragic encounter at a redneck cafe, in a scene shot in Morganza, just northwest of Baton Rouge, and again populated by locals.
(Other Louisiana filming locations included Krotz Springs, where the highway scenes were shot for the film's abrupt, and affecting, finale.)
As for their New Orleans shoot, Hopper and company mostly flew under radar while in town -- probably because they didn't bother getting permission to shoot anywhere. That includes the film's memorable acid-trip scene shot at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and the iconic images of Fonda conversing with a statue on the Italian Benevolent Society Tomb.
In October 1969, when "Easy Rider" opened in New Orleans, at the Sena Mall Theater, Times-Picayune columnist Frank Gagnard wrote in his "On the Square" column how Fonda, Hopper "and their associates came into town unheralded (during) Mardi Gras and were easily overlooked in the scramble."
"They were here, though," Gagnard continued. "There is indelible proof in some actual Carnival scenes."
As it turned out, the Big Easy portion of the "Easy Rider" shoot wasn't so easy at all. In fact, much of the shoestring production -- from a New Orleans test shoot, to principal photography, to the editing process -- was embroiled in rancor.
For better or for worse, that was how Hopper rolled. Off-the-cuff, edgy, a little crazy.

In 2007, the American Film Institute put "Easy Rider" at No. 84 on its list of the greatest movies of all time, but its larger legacy might be in Hopper's approach to filmmaking, with his stutter cuts, his unflinching portrayal of life in the late 1960s, and shaky camerawork that often made "Easy Rider" feel just a shade shy of a documentary. Along with films such as "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate" and "Midnight Cowboy," it would become a hallmark of the post-classical "New Hollywood" era, in which fresh, young filmmakers traded the overproduced tradition of earlier years for raw realism.
Last October, it was announced that Hopper was fighting cancer. By January, it had metastasized to his bones, and in March his lawyer revealed in court proceedings connected to Hopper's ugly divorce from his wife that the actor was dying.
A couple of weeks later, he would accept a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- among his final public appearances -- with "Easy Rider" co-star Nicholson at his side. Hopper appeared to be happy as a clam, but he was frail and, at a reported 100 pounds, was dwarfed even by his newsboy cap. In other words, except for that broad smile, he hardly looked like Billy at all anymore.
I prefer to remember him from a scene in "Easy Rider," when he's bedding down in the desert with Fonda, a week outside of New Orleans. It's there that he says, in a line dripping with symbolism, "It's a long way to Mardi Gras, baby."
Here's hoping he's made it.